When T-Mobile released the G1 (aka the HTC Dream) two weeks ago, I caved in and bought it. No more waiting for Nokia to someday bring its own touch interface to the U.S., I decided! I bought a G1 online within hours of it going on sale, and I made plans to sell my four-month-old Nokia N82.

History

To explain my interest in the G1, I have to back up a little. Ever since I first saw the iPhone’s UI, I’ve stared at my S60 devices like a husband with a wandering eye: I want to be faithful to my Nseries phone, which I love dearly, but how can I when there are these sexy new models moving in to the neighborhood?

I’d always successfully resisted the iPhone’s siren call, mainly because I’ve never been impressed with what that UI or the hardware can actually *do* once you get past the surface beauty. But I’m a sucker for open source projects–even when the term is only loosely applied, as it is with Google’s Android OS–and consequently I’ve been secretly lusting after an Android device since the project first came to my attention.

Not sexy enough. There was nothing wrong with my N82, you understand, other than it just wasn’t *sexy* enough to me. No touch screen, no *big* screen, no physical keyboard, no it-just-works syncing with the great Google cloud.

After playing with the G1 for an hour or two, though, I thought, “I’ll just hang on to the N82 for a few days before trying to sell it. Just in case.” After spending a weekend with the G1, I thought, “I’d better keep the N82 until my return period has expired on the G1. Just in case.” And exactly one week after having first turned on the G1, I packed it up to ship back to T-Mobile, and came groveling back to my N82.

Back to the Nokia N82

The build quality of the G1 isn’t that great. The G1 isn’t a shoddy phone by any means, but I suspect some corners were cut to bring it to market at such a low price. The biggest problem I had with the build of the phone was the slide-up screen. Instead of gliding smoothly open, it snaps up loudly into place, and whether open or closed the screen sits at the slightest angle to the rest of the phone. It’s not an intentional design quirk, as far as I can tell–it’s just a consequence of how the hinge mechanism is constructed. Mine never squeaked, but I’ve read reports online of the hinge becoming even noisier after a few weeks of use.

Battery life was the worst I’ve ever seen on a phone–mine would drop by 20% within an hour of full charge, and that was with GPS and 3G turned off. (I suspect WiFi connectivity was draining it, but to turn that off as well would have negated the whole point of owning the G1.)

In addition, it’s both larger and heavier than my N82, which was already heavier than my N95. Why a newer camera with fewer features should be both heavier *and* bigger is a puzzle to me–I can only assume it was to cut costs, but I suspect it was also the consequence of a rushed design phase.

And finally, the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the tinny, single speaker that’s easily muffled when the phone is face-up, are both head-scratchers when one of the key selling points of your phone is that it can handle multimedia.

The camera is unusable. I was optimistic that the G1, while never matching my N82′s camera functionality, would suffice for snapshots. After all, day-to-day snaps of things don’t need amazing optics or mountains of megapixels. What I found, however, was that the camera and its software were both so undercooked that it was for all practical purposes unusable. The camera app was slow to launch, taking 3 to 5 seconds. Focus time (which you can’t turn off) took another 3 to 5 seconds. Taking the photo, another 3 to 4 seconds. By my rough estimate, that’s between 9 and 14 seconds before you can even find out if the shot you took is worth keeping (more on that below). By comparison, I can pull my N82 out of my pocket, launch the camera, and end up with a crisp, ready-to-share photo in about 7-8 seconds.

Time-to-shot isn’t the only problem, and I could probably even live with the slower G1 camera if only the photos were usable. Instead, with the exception of a few macro shots (the one area where the phone excels), everything I shot with the G1 was blurry and dark. There’s no flash, but even in well-lit indoor environments the photos looked like I was having a seizure when I hit the shutter button.

I remember the problems I had with my original N95 camera a couple of years ago, and I know a lot can change with a few well-designed firmware updates. But even in its original buggy state, the N95 took decent photos. What I quickly realized with the G1 was that I would almost never be able to use my phone as a snapshot camera.

The Phone is Ugly. Sure, beauty is negotiable. I for one love the asymmetrical wedge-shape of the Amazon Kindle, which has been widely loathed by some consumer electronics fans. But the G1 is the first phone I’ve seen where there doesn’t seem to be *any* design. It seems purely function over form. I thought that was supposed to create its own sort of beauty, but the theory doesn’t hold with the G1. The flat black case is without personality; the PDA layout of buttons looks dated; the swing-up screen, as I mentioned above, “clacks” into place, and rests awkwardly at an angle whether in an open or closed position; the flush mirrored boundary around the camera captures smudges that obscure the camera’s pinhole opening. The “chin” on the phone doesn’t bother me, although I know some users have complained about it, but it doesn’t improve the look of the device either.

By contrast, the iPhone is a stunner, and some of Nokia’s Nseries are well-balanced achievements of mixing subtle design choices (e.g. the patterned plastic battery covers) with necessities of design (screen, d-pad, numerical keys).

The more I stared at the G1, the more I was puzzled by HTC’s choice to forgo any design. Here’s an opportunity to ride the Android hype wave and elevate your own reputation as a handset maker, so that people who buy the G1 equate HTC with awesome hardware. For some reason, HTC let that opportunity pass–and another handset maker will surely come along soon enough and win attention that HTC should have won, being first out of the gate.

Carrier lock-in on a cheap, underwhelming phone? No thank you. Being tied to a single carrier for two years, and *still* paying nearly $200 for a phone that was outdated (hardware-wise) as soon as I took it out of the box, was a deal-breaker. I honestly couldn’t see myself using the G1 for more than six months tops, which is too short a period to pay $200 + 2-years-committment for.

Okay, I’ve hated on the G1 enough. Not everything about it is bad, of course: a couple of days before I made my decision to return it, I pulled up a demo of the Nokia 5800 to comapre interfaces, and the contrast between the two was striking. The S60′s touch interface looked so sad and clunky in comparison to Android’s elegance. Here, then, are the things I still love about the G1, or rather about Android.

Syncing is perfect. Setting aside the lock-in and privacy issues of being forced to use Google’s email, calendar, and contacts services, the experience of turning on the G1 for the first time was phenomenal. You’re presented with a login screen where you enter your Google account info, and as soon as you hit submit, the phone connects with the Google cloud and pulls all of your email, calendar, and address book data down to your phone. If you change a contact’s information, it’s synced up to your online contacts list without you having to worry about it. I’ve never experienced such a pure “it just works” moment with any other computer or phone. Android has set a new bar for how to manage the customer data syncing experience.

Android’s alert messaging pane is nearly perfect. Perhaps the best design innovation of Android is its messaging pane–as events happen, they are sent to the messaging pane, which hide along the top border of the screen and slides down like a window shade when triggered. It’s accessible from any app with a simple flick, and it presents everything that’s going on at that moment with your phone: new email messages, new text messages, the current music track you’re playing, download and install notices, calendar appointments, and system alerts.

Android’s extensive GPS/location-based services show a lot of potential. Android isn’t the first to market with location-based apps, obviously, but what it’s doing in the field is interesting. A couple of great apps I tested included a radar/compass app–which tells you how far away your target is, and in what direction, and best of all can be accessed by other location-based apps–and a Wikipedia app that pulled up entries relevant to your current location based on GPS data. Unlike the sluggish Nokia Maps, Android’s maps were fast and fun to drag around and zoom in and out of. In addition, tapping on an address on a web page–it didn’t have to be a link, as the OS is smart enough to just know what an address looks like–brings up the location on a map. It’s all pretty much seamless and invisible. If my N82′s location-based potential was equal to what the G1 can already pull off, I’d be using it a lot more in daily life, instead of just showing it off to friends as a feature of the phone.

The App Market isn’t perfect, but at least it’s not Download! (or MOSH)
And finally, there’s one more element to the Android ecosphere that I think warrants some discussion: Android’s App Market. It’s too early to predict whether it will evolve into a high-quality marketplace for apps, or an anything-goes bazaar a la MOSH (which I love for its variety but find frustrating to search through because of the chaff). But one thing it *isn’t*, thank the gods, is Download!, Nokia’s broken mini-store that comes pre-installed on its phones. Download! is an embarrassment to Nokia–or should be, but since they keep including it on their handsets I have to assume that either they don’t care that it’s so horrible or they’ve forgotten it exists. (Although it looks like Nokia is finally addressing the problem later this month–we’ll see what happens.)

I have a feeling the App Market’s $25 entry fee, along with the rather aggressive app-rating practices being employed so far by G1 early adopters, will keep the App Market free from too much of the junk that clutters up MOSH, while at the same time it’s an open enough marketplace for hobbyists and freeware developers to participate. Symbian nearly broke the S60 freeware/hobbyist market with their changes to how apps are signed last year, although the developing community seems to be slowly adjusting to the new signing system. I’m impressed the Android is being more open than Symbian, and relying upon the security of its OS as well as the good sense of each phone’s owner, to make sure useful apps are installed.

Conclusion

After a week with the G1, my conclusion was that Android is loaded with promise, but the G1 represents a squandered opportunity for T-Mobile and HTC. I’m certain upcoming firmware updates will iron out kinds in the Android OS, and may even make the camera usable for basic snapshots, but you can’t fix ugly design or poor build quality over-the-air. The G1 is definitely not a smart phone, and with the lack of a headphone jack, decent speakers, or the ability to record video or take decent photos, it’s not even really a feature phone.

I thought I’d have some regret over giving up on the Android OS, and to be honest, I *do* miss the fun of tapping and dragging. I spent far too many hours just swiping between the three desktops, just because it was fun to do. But mostly I’m just grateful to have a truly high-quality phone in my pocket once again. Nokia N82, I promise I won’t leave you again… or at least until the successor to the 5800 hits the U.S. market.